Accelerating AI Adoption for Customer Loyalty - Insights with Salesforce and IBM (#691)

Bridget: I’m absolutely delighted to have guests today from IBM and Salesforce.

Bridget: So join me in welcoming Shannon Miller, senior partner and lead of travel and transportation industry for IBM, and Tom Bockholt, vice president and general manager of strategic accounts for Salesforce.

Bridget: So let’s get at it regarding this disruptor called artificial intelligence.

Tom: Companies have had these discussions about data and all of the data and the proliferation of data and how it’s just, you know, multiplying on top of itself.

Tom: And do we have good customer data?

Tom: It’s always been a conversation.

Tom: But now with AI, it’s becoming absolutely top of mind for everyone, because if the data is not good, AI is not going to generate a good response or a good interaction.

Shannon: What customers are expecting today, what they’ve always wanted is hyper personalization.

Shannon: And what they’re expecting today is hyper personalization, because they’re starting to get it at certain places.

Shannon: And for the first time, the technology has kind of caught up with that expectation.

Shannon: So when we think about hyper personalization, it really is about a couple of things.

Shannon: One is our ability to scale, which I mentioned.

Shannon: And with AI, that gives us the ability to actually scale on a person by person basis and create those interactions that are much more highly personalized.

Tom: That unified customer profile is one that’s been around for a long time.

Tom: People seeking that goal of having a single profile of a customer.

Tom: And it just this makes it that much more important.

Shannon: So those kind of discussions are really starting to bubble to the surface.

Shannon: And clients are starting to for the first time, not just talk about them, but start to plan out how they’re going to take the leap into actually doing that.

Paula: Hello and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, a show for loyalty marketing professionals.

Paula: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, where we feature insightful conversations with loyalty professionals from the world’s leading brands.

Paula: Today’s episode is hosted by Bridget Blaise-Shamai, former president of the AA Advantage Program, the award-winning travel rewards program of American Airlines.

Paula: Bridget is a global C-suite executive and is currently advising VC-backed startups in loyalty, travel, and payments.

Paula: Enjoy.

Bridget: Hi, everybody, I’m Bridget Blaise-Shamai, and I am your host today for this edition of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Let’s Talk Loyalty TV.

Bridget: I’m absolutely delighted to have guests today from IBM and Salesforce.

Bridget: So join me in welcoming Shannon Miller, senior partner and lead of travel and transportation industry for IBM, and Tom Bockholt, vice president and general manager of strategic accounts for Salesforce.

Bridget: Welcome Shannon and Tom.

Shannon: Thanks, Bridget.

Shannon: Super, super excited to be here.

Shannon: And as you said, love leading the industry of travel, transportation, hospitality where loyalty is so important.

Shannon: But I spent most of my entire career in consulting and almost all of it around customer experience, loyalty and customer strategy.

Shannon: So it’s a topic near and dear to my heart.

Bridget: Love it.

Bridget: I love every bit of it.

Tom: Likewise, Bridget.

Tom: Thank you.

Tom: Super excited to be here as well.

Tom: Great to be sharing time with IBM, a great partner for Salesforce.

Tom: Unlike Shannon, I’m a little bit newer to loyalty as kind of an industry.

Tom: I’m running our travel, transportation, hospitality vertical.

Tom: I’ve been in this role for a year now.

Tom: Obviously, very relevant topic with everything we’re doing today at Salesforce.

Bridget: Yeah, I appreciate this summary of your backgrounds.

Bridget: I think what we’re finding ever more are greater and greater appreciation of loyalty program assets by companies and how they are ever more, I’m giving them the internal profile and profile and investment that I think is really ripe for conversation today with what all that IBM and Salesforce is doing together to just best enable companies to get the most out of these loyalty assets.

Bridget: So we have a great conversation here set up.

Bridget: So let’s get at it.

Bridget: So our founder, Paula Thomas, has a favorite question she always likes to kick off the interviews with.

Bridget: And her current favorite question is about non-fiction books that have had an impact on our guests from a customer loyalty perspective or leadership perspective or just even life in general.

Bridget: How is that insights from these books or A-book really contributed to your in these roles that you are in today?

Bridget: Shannon, you want to kick us off?

Shannon: Sure.

Bridget: Sure.

Shannon: You’ll have to bear with me on the name of this book.

Shannon: It always raises eyebrows, but the name of the book is actually called Getting Naked.

Shannon: And it’s by Patrick Lencioni.

Shannon: I give it out or have my team read it often because it’s really about, in my industry, in the services consulting industry, how do we shed some things that sabotage client loyalty?

Shannon: And it’s about being authentic and opening yourself to getting engaged with customers and really building that relationship on a different level.

Shannon: Totally changed the way I approach consulting and the way that we approach conversation.

Shannon: So it’s super important to my career and ask everyone to read it on my teams.

Bridget: I like everything you just said.

Bridget: Thanks for sharing.

Tom: That’s a good one.

Tom: I’m going to give you two.

Tom: So, the first one is a bit of a shameless plug because it’s by our founder, Marc Benioff.

Tom: The book is titled Trailblazer, Why Business is the Greatest Platform for Change.

Tom: So we call Trailblazers our customers who are just maniacal about the Salesforce platform.

Tom: That term was coined by a former CMO at Salesforce very early on.

Tom: And it’s just permeated the culture of the company.

Tom: When you see presentations from Salesforce, we always talk about the unified platform and the customer 360, and always at the very center of that is our customer.

Tom: And so that’s really important.

Tom: I think Marc takes it to heart.

Tom: He’s built a culture at the company around that.

Tom: And so that’s a great book.

Tom: It’s a great read for that reason.

Tom: The other one I would share is by Carl Sewell, and that’s Customers for Life.

Tom: And he is a person that started an automobile dealership years and years ago, grew that, and has this philosophy around having a customer for life versus transactional or transactions.

Tom: And it’s really important when you think about just how that builds on loyalty and builds those relationships over a long term.

Bridget: So thank you both.

Bridget: I have not read any of those titles, but look forward to putting them in my prioritization of reading.

Bridget: And for our audience, we will be including these titles and authors in our show notes today for your time to go and perhaps read them as well.

Bridget: So thank you both.

Bridget: I think those are both great examples here today.

Bridget: So while I did introduce y’all, I simply gave your titles, and it’d be great to share with our audience a bit more about your background in terms of professional experiences and the scope of your current role.

Bridget: Tom, you want to kick us off?

Tom: Sure.

Tom: So in terms of my current role, I lead our travel, transportation, hospitality, vertical for enterprise business in the Americas.

Tom: I’ve been at Salesforce now five years.

Tom: I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the enterprise space, in a lot of different verticals over my career, but always in the software, primarily enterprise software, Microsoft and other companies like that.

Tom: And in the services industry.

Tom: So our partners are near and dear to us in the software business.

Tom: So, yeah.

Bridget: Terrific.

Bridget: Thank you.

Bridget: Shannon, how about you?

Shannon: Yeah, absolutely.

Shannon: I think I mentioned, I spent most, it’s actually all of my career post-college has been in consulting.

Shannon: So been passionate about it and frankly, we’re only as successful as our partners are as Tom mentioned.

Shannon: So spent many, many years collaborating with our partners.

Shannon: I’ve actually led our Salesforce practice here at IBM, along with our customer experience practice for many years and now in a role very similar to Tom’s.

Shannon: I lead our travel, transportation and hospitality industry in North America for IBM consulting.

Bridget: I love the word collaboration.

Bridget: Really some of the very best experiences I had working with folks like IBM and Salesforce came from true business and IBM slash Salesforce collaboration where it was very unified and as one team.

Bridget: So thank you for bringing it up.

Bridget: I think it’s clutch that that is what has established them as the parties.

Bridget: Okay.

Bridget: Also in the spirit of only giving a high level explanation of IBM and Salesforce partnering together on accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence for clients, can you help our audience understand better what that actually means?

Bridget: What does this collaboration between your two companies mean as it relates to this accelerated adoption of AI?

Shannon: Yeah.

Shannon: I mean, look, I think if we start at the very top, this partnership is Marc Benioff and Arvind Krishna.

Shannon: I mean, they meet regularly.

Shannon: Our two companies have agreed to partner on AI.

Shannon: We agreed to partner in many different ways.

Shannon: And they’re constantly discussing how we take that partnership to the next level.

Shannon: I think we are one of the five largest SIs that partner with Salesforce.

Shannon: And in our industry, partnering around the loyalty platform has been critical, right?

Shannon: We partner across sales, service, marketing, all the different components that Tom’s company and Salesforce builds, but we build the unique industry knowledge and the experience to actually transform the business around that platform.

Shannon: And I think it’s been a great partnership.

Shannon: I thoroughly enjoyed spending probably the most of the last five years just digging in with Salesforce until this most recent change.

Bridget: Yeah, it’s a really important point about, you know, you need the enabling tools to really support the desired business vision and business outcomes.

Bridget: And there’s just no short changing that working very much in collaboration and being very, you know, simpatico on really how goals are met and customer engagement goals are met and loyalty is achieved.

Bridget: So thank you for that.

Bridget: Anything from you, Tom, on that part?

Tom: Yeah, I would echo what Shannon said.

Tom: And I, you know, I think as a software company, it’s super critical for us.

Tom: I mean, you can have a great platform, but if you don’t have a great partner to go and implement that, that really understands the customer and their business and their goals, the implementations can fail and the project can fail.

Tom: So it’s, it’s, it’s definitely something that we are super focused on.

Tom: You know, IBM has been around a really long time.

Tom: So when we get into like loyalty pursuits, as an example, a lot of what we see is customers that are still on a mainframe.

Tom: And so, you know, a partner like IBM brings just a breath of experience when we start modernizing platforms or connecting to systems like that, that are well beyond the scope of what we would normally be doing.

Bridget: Yeah, all great points, all very important points.

Bridget: Okay, so let’s get at it regarding this disruptor called artificial intelligence.

Bridget: And as I reflect on this, given my own background in both big and small companies, oftentimes the company is making plans for the following year, three, six, maybe even more months prior to that year even ending.

Bridget: So you’re doing your darndest on a bunch of things, including the desired customer experience.

Bridget: And you think you’ve got it all lined up.

Bridget: And here comes a disruptor, that disruptor called artificial intelligence, that knocks you off your game on what you were doing because it’s either no longer relevant or somebody’s leapfrogged you or whatever the case may be.

Bridget: So it’d be really great if you can tell us what you’re seeing in terms of a company actually using artificial intelligence to get themselves not only back on track, but perhaps even re-imagining that customer experience because of what AI is clearly able to do.

Tom: Yeah, for us, that’s probably part of every single conversation I have with customers today.

Tom: You know, a year and a half ago, we probably weren’t even thinking about these things.

Tom: Clearly, somebody was because they all hit the market.

Tom: But, you know, if you think about kind of the evolution from predictive to generative to autonomous and fully, you know, enabled agents and agents talking to agents, it’s a massive disruption that’s happened in a really short period of time.

Tom: It’s really, really relevant in this industry in particular, because we have such a heavy footprint with service.

Tom: So not only service, but sales and marketing, it’s penetrating all of those.

Tom: And this conversation around how do we incorporate digital labor?

Tom: How do we become more efficient?

Tom: How do we get closer to our customers and better understand what they want before they even ask us?

Tom: How do we eliminate the need to have some of the conversations by being proactive in what we’re doing?

Tom: So it’s definitely critical.

Tom: It’s something that we’re talking about with all customers.

Tom: But I think, from a service standpoint, that’s probably the number one focus right now that we’re seeing.

Bridget: Are you seeing any changes to planning cycles?

Bridget: You know, I guess in my mind, suddenly the analog is you kind of got this waterfall approach three, six months prior to the year end planning for the following versus something more agile where you’re just kind of doing something and figuring out what works or doesn’t and modifying accordingly.

Bridget: I mean, are you seeing any changes to planning cycles so far?

Tom: I think the big one that I’m seeing is the fact that companies have had these discussions about data and all of the data and the proliferation of data and how it’s just, you know, multiplying on top of itself.

Tom: And do we have good customer data?

Tom: It’s always been a conversation.

Tom: But now with AI, it’s becoming absolutely top of mind for everyone, because if the data is not good, AI is not going to generate a good response or a good interaction.

Tom: And if you’re going to put a digital agent in front of your most valuable asset, your customer, it’s got to have the right data to act on.

Tom: Otherwise, that customer is not sticking around.

Tom: So that is, I guess, becoming even more important.

Tom: So focusing on that data estate and how you connect all the different data sources prior to enabling AI is absolutely critical.

Tom: So it is lengthening some of that cycle.

Bridget: I almost find it a disservice on the number of conversations I have been a part of, that wanting to talk about AI, sexy AI, oh my gosh, it’s going to do this and that for us, when the underlying data assets are incomplete or they’re not clean or whatever.

Bridget: So, you know, it’s still again, you know, what is going in is reflective of what’s going to come out.

Bridget: And that’s why you’ve got to have good data hygiene and good priority around your data assets all the time.

Tom: Yeah, there’s so many in, you know, that unified customer profile is one that’s been around for a long time.

Tom: People, you know, seeking that goal of having a single profile of a customer.

Tom: And it just, this makes it that much more important.

Tom: And you have so many different systems and so many different records of customers that having that ability to tie that together, to provide that most accurate response and the most timely response, that’s super critical.

Bridget: Yes, yes it is.

Bridget: So we talked about, you know, this inanimate thing called AI.

Bridget: But there’s also a very animated disruptor out there all the time.

Bridget: And that’s us human beings, right?

Bridget: You know, we have a demand curve, taste and preferences are changing.

Bridget: So what are you seeing in terms of changing customer expectations, changing relevance to customers that may be prompting, obligating businesses to rethink, redo their loyalty program capabilities?

Shannon: Yeah, I mean, look, when we talk about AI as it relates to most anything, but specifically around customer experience, we talk about three things, data scale and kind of productivity.

Shannon: And Tom really hit the first one around data in the customer piece really well.

Shannon: So no need to rehash that.

Shannon: But on the productivity side, it’s how can we make our own people, our own clients’ people and their employees more productive in what they’re trying to do, whether that is helping them generate content, whether it’s helped them interact in a more efficient way with their end customers.

Shannon: But to get to your point, it really is around that third one, which is around scale.

Shannon: Because what customers are expecting today, what they’ve always wanted is hyper personalization, right?

Shannon: And what they’re expecting today is hyper personalization because they’re starting to get it at certain places.

Shannon: And for the first time, the technology has kind of caught up with that expectation.

Shannon: So when we think about hyper personalization, it really is about a couple of things.

Shannon: One is our ability to scale, which I mentioned.

Shannon: And with AI, that gives us the ability to actually scale on a person by person basis and create those interactions that are much more highly personalized.

Shannon: And then I think the other piece of this is to, in order to truly do hyper personalization, you not only have to have the skill, but you have to be able to understand customer intent.

Shannon: Right?

Shannon: And so it’s not just about what I know about the past of my customer and having the customer profile, although having that is an absolute first step in the critical path to do this.

Shannon: It’s, why are they interacting with me today?

Shannon: Am I taking a flight because I’m going to have fun?

Shannon: I’m on a business trip?

Shannon: Have I had a personal tragedy?

Shannon: And to be able to hyper personalize that experience and that journey using AI allows me to really create a deeper set of experience with that customer and create loyalty that I’ve never been able to do in the past.

Shannon: And so those kinds of discussions are really starting to bubble to the surface and clients are starting to for the first time, not just talk about them, but start to plan out how they’re going to take the leap into actually doing that.

Shannon: And I think it’s why it’s so important for us to partner with people at Tom, because you need a large, robust platform like Salesforce in order to do that and build those capabilities on top of.

Bridget: That’s that’s excellent point you make on the capability is now in the same league of the business hope, wish and dream of engaging with a customer like you know them.

Bridget: So that’s a terrific point and you know, just building upon what you just said and I just asked us as a consumer myself, it’s been so interesting seeing this evolution on marketing to end consumers.

Bridget: The game now is increasingly played to endless influencers through social media.

Bridget: So much so that you’re seeing even powerful brands like Meta and Google citing ad sales softening.

Bridget: Because it just moved down to fill in the blank person, who’s got a set of followers that are very influenced by what they are recommending.

Bridget: So hyper-personalization is a requirement to succeed, I think.

Shannon: Couldn’t agree more.

Bridget: Okay.

Bridget: Awesome, awesome.

Bridget: So are there any use cases yet on this, Shannon or Tom?

Bridget: Or is it too early on on businesses getting their arms around and being in market on hyper-personalization?

Shannon: So Tom, I’m not sure about you, but what we’re seeing is we’re starting to see, you know, our clients really talk about the art of the possible and use cases in terms of bringing in ancillary services, right?

Shannon: Not just what they offer, but what do their partners offer?

Shannon: We talk about our partnership.

Shannon: A lot of our clients are looking at their partners as well.

Shannon: And in the travel and hospitality space, those are endless, right?

Shannon: Because I don’t book a trip with only my airline in mind, right?

Shannon: There’s a place I have to stay, there’s a car I have to rent, there’s experiences that I want to have, all of those things.

Shannon: And so AI is starting to let us create assets and approaches that bring all of those together and even get to the point where they start to execute the transaction so that I don’t have to interact with four or five different entities to create a great experience.

Shannon: They almost think about my trip that I’m planning in travel, transportation, hospitality as a journey for me and start to plan it that way.

Shannon: And I think AI and agents specifically and agents, talking to agents, or what’s going to make that super fast, super easy for our end customers?

Tom: No, I was going to echo what Shannon said.

Tom: I mean, I literally travel every single week.

Tom: The amount of data and the ability to scale across all the different partners that come into play, whether it’s the airline, the hotel, the rental car, the Uber, the restaurant, services within a hotel or otherwise, that amount of data is enabling things that have not existed in the past.

Tom: So what we’re seeing a lot of customers ask for is the ability to run far greater numbers of programs and far different breadth of those programs within them.

Tom: So they may run a promotion, they may have the ability to do a hundred and they’re looking to do a thousand now.

Tom: So it’s causing quite a scale situation.

Bridget: Yeah, maybe we’ll actually get to one-on-one marketing with all these great capabilities and all these data assets.

Bridget: That would be unbelievably terrific.

Tom: That would be unbelievable.

Bridget: Yeah.

Bridget: So we’ve talked a bit about change and disruption, etc., AI, consumer changes and trends, etc.

Bridget: Talking about change is the simple, easy part, right?

Bridget: Let’s talk a little bit about when you are considering and actually implementing a new customer loyalty platform.

Bridget: It is costly, both in terms of time consumed and the expense, and it’s risky.

Bridget: So can you talk to us a bit about anything you may be involved with with a client that actually gives equal view or greater view maybe on the return of this investment, instead of just looking at like, oh my gosh, this is going to cost me, I don’t know, tens of millions of dollars versus saying, okay, it’s going to cost me tens of millions of dollars, but the return that I believe I’m going to get on this is ten-fold of this.

Bridget: So what are you seeing with your clients in conversations on, yes, it has an expense to it, but it is the path to this kind of return?

Tom: It’s 100 percent mission critical at the C-suite level.

Tom: These large, large loyalty programs, they talk about in terms of billions of dollars.

Tom: So yes, it’s a significant investment when they go to make a change or if they’re re-platforming, but they’re not taken lightly.

Tom: So these are things that there’s number of stakeholders across the C-suite.

Tom: You see people that are the head of the loyalty programs that are involved, but it’s also IT, it’s sales, it’s marketing, it’s the service center, it literally touches all parts of the business.

Tom: So it’s a super critical undertaking and I think most customers don’t tend to go with a big bang approach to this.

Tom: They tend to start an implementation, get the minimum viable product, start realizing benefit and then building on that platform over time, which is why we talk a lot about having that unified platform and that ability to grow it and scale it.

Tom: And that’s where the importance of having partners like IBM comes in, to be able to touch all of the different systems that come into play because there’s, in some cases, there’s hundreds of integrations that are happening behind the scenes with these solutions.

Tom: So it is not a quick and easy undertaking.

Bridget: You raised two points in there that I think are really important.

Bridget: And there’s a lot of functional groups that need to be a part of such a decision.

Bridget: But the one I really think should get as much attention than anything is the servicing piece by employees of the company and what impact that may have on policies and procedures, et cetera, and training.

Bridget: And then the matter of being able to build it over time, it doesn’t all have to be monolithic and done at once.

Bridget: And so I think those are important points to consider as one is taking on this investment.

Bridget: And so the other thing, though, about AI, what are you seeing in terms of making such decisions, right?

Bridget: The reality of time not under your control, if you ever thought you had any, you certainly don’t think you have it now with the speed by which AI is changing the marketplace landscape, right?

Bridget: So what are you seeing in terms of either AI indeed accelerating path to decision or doing the opposite, slowing it down?

Bridget: And how do you help on the former, if it’s the latter, pardon me, the latter, if that proves to be in play?

Shannon: So I think for me, the discussion to Tom’s point earlier, it always starts with what am I going to get out of this?

Shannon: What’s the benefits and what’s the cost decreases I’m going to have by implementing and if we come and have those discussions without a point of view around how we’re going to leverage AI to do those things, we probably don’t get a second conversation, right?

Shannon: So from our standpoint, when you’re talking loyalty, as Tom mentioned, it’s mission critical for an airline, for a hotel, it is absolutely core to their business.

Shannon: And so we actually see a little bit of both, right?

Shannon: It is not uncommon to see paralysis by analysis, right?

Shannon: In a company still trying to figure out, what are we going to allow from an AI perspective?

Shannon: What are we not going to allow?

Shannon: Oh, I’m very nervous to touch this system, nervous to touch that system.

Shannon: And I think Tom was spot on around, you take a crawl, walk, run approach in terms of get the platform in place, which by the way, isn’t undertaking, right?

Shannon: And you need trusted partners to do that, but get the platform in place and then start to build capabilities on top of that once you have it in place.

Shannon: And you can start to immediately see ROI as you turn those capabilities on.

Shannon: And so not coming in and talking about, okay, we’re going to, not just, we’re going to help you with revenue, it’s we’re going to actually increase the engagement frequency, we’re going to improve your retention rate, we’re going to see improvement around that customer acquisition.

Shannon: Those things you actually need to put in the business cases.

Shannon: Sometimes we’re even asked to commit to those in terms of outcomes as well.

Shannon: So it’s absolutely mission critical and the game is very different today than it was two or three years ago for sure.

Bridget: So Shannon, do I understand you that you are engaging in some outcome based contracts or engagements with your clients?

Shannon: Absolutely, 100 percent.

Shannon: Sometimes it could be as simple as the outcome is, we have capabilities turned on at a specific set of time and we’re committing to the amount of time it’s going to take to turn those on, all the way to structuring some things around call deflection for example, in a call center, right?

Shannon: Or improve handling time and getting to resolution for the customer, right?

Shannon: All those things improve loyalty.

Shannon: They also save cost for our clients.

Shannon: And so we’re sometimes being asked to do that and we absolutely engage in those types of contracts.

Bridget: That’s terrific to hear really.

Bridget: So we’ve talked about cost, right?

Bridget: Both in time and in money.

Bridget: I’d like to talk about risk here.

Bridget: And mostly in and around the cutover, right?

Bridget: There’s risks all along the way.

Bridget: But, you know, as Tom mentioned, you’re likely to have integrating and downline systems aplenty.

Bridget: And as a veteran of situating myself in a war room on big and small cutovers, you know, I’ve seen it all.

Bridget: I’ve seen it all.

Bridget: What are you seeing in terms of like best practices or any tips that you may have that actually mitigate or even eliminate risk as you go to this very important moment of cutting over to a new system?

Tom: We can have a separate podcast probably just on that.

Shannon: Yeah.

Tom: I think for us, it’s, you know, there’s several things.

Tom: One, you know, we always talk about the power of the unified platform and the fact that you have kind of a future proof solution with the Salesforce platform.

Tom: We’re constantly iterating on that platform.

Tom: So there’s three core releases that happen every year for all of our products.

Tom: When it comes to things like AI, that functionality is dropping in a much faster pace.

Tom: So I think there’s a conversation around, you know, build versus buy, there’s a conversation around customization and how much customization you do.

Tom: The more you customize, the more difficult it gets to take advantage of those new releases that we come out with or changes in the industry, right?

Tom: If you weren’t designing for something like AI in mind and you weren’t focused on your data, you’re going to find yourself having to go fix that down the road.

Tom: So there’s a big piece around that, I think.

Tom: Another piece is having a governance structure in place when you’re implementing projects like this and really understanding what it takes to be successful in rolling it out.

Tom: And, you know, again, kind of starting with that crawl, walk, run approach so that you can keep those things in check.

Bridget: Yeah, governance is really important, Tom.

Bridget: I’m glad you brought that up.

Shannon: Completely agree.

Shannon: I mean, look, Tom’s right.

Shannon: I mean, the reality is when we have cut over issues, it’s very rarely around the core platform.

Shannon: It’s all around data migration and integrations, right?

Shannon: Those are the two things that always seem to, that and a lack of executive sponsorship, right?

Shannon: So I know one example that I could, you know, it was near and dear to me within the last couple of years is we took a client who was in the technology space in the auto industry.

Shannon: They had made multiple acquisitions.

Shannon: They had, I think, five different instances of Salesforce across 11 different brands.

Shannon: And they decided to consolidate into one.

Shannon: And it wasn’t just marketing, it was sales, service marketing and CPQ for their quoting.

Shannon: And so I won having the CFO say, we’re going to one, all of you get in line.

Shannon: It was really important to having that executive sponsorship.

Shannon: But putting a plan in place and an entire work stream that was on focus on absolutely nothing but data migration and integrations was key.

Shannon: And then what we did is we picked two or three low risk brands and brought them on the platform first.

Shannon: And then a few months later, we brought two more on, and then we brought four more on.

Shannon: And we did it across three or four different waves to minimize impact to the business, but also to let us learn, bring the easiest piece on first, get the glitches out of the way, get the system working well, and then start to bring on the more complex use cases once you’re stable and everyone understands how to use the platform.

Shannon: So there’s some great risk mitigation activities that we can just do through things we’ve learned on projects from many years ago and it’s not net new to this.

Shannon: But we can also start to leverage AI to speed up how fast you can do those things too, right?

Shannon: Writing user stories using AI, building test automation scripts and all of those things way ahead of time.

Shannon: We can speed that process up and really reduce the risk as well.

Bridget: Yeah, I think you guys just gave the audience a terrific verbal white paper on how to do this right.

Bridget: So thank you.

Bridget: It was very comprehensive.

Tom: You can’t underestimate the importance of Shannon’s point around the complex use cases too, because with AI, you know, what we see a lot with clients is they see this futuristic capability and the ability to go do things that they’ve never been able to do before.

Tom: And they build out this massively complex use case that they want to start with.

Tom: And it’s really, really, it’s really time consuming.

Tom: It is super risky to go that route versus taking something that may just be generative or predictive in nature versus fully autonomous or agent to agent.

Tom: Start with something simple, which actually, I mean, you’d be shocked at some of the results that we see with customers.

Tom: I mean, our own internal support site, if you go to help.salesforce.com, is all being leveraged with agents.

Tom: We see massive deflection in cases based on that.

Tom: And it’s been super successful.

Tom: And that was a relatively simple and quick implementation compared to some of these cases we see.

Shannon: No, it’s a great point.

Shannon: I mean, I love the vision and love the idea of where you want to get to.

Shannon: But we go back to what we said earlier with the crawl, walk and then run.

Shannon: We did the same with our HR systems inside IBM, right?

Shannon: We use Ask HR, it’s a very public story.

Shannon: But when it first came on, it was a basic chatbot that actually told you what to go do in the system.

Shannon: We’re now fully agentic, right?

Shannon: We go in and we ask and it actually goes and executes all of those things in the HR system for us.

Shannon: And so we definitely, that was an 18 to 24 month journey.

Shannon: It did not happen overnight.

Shannon: And I think you’re spot on with pick something you can get a win with and start to get the right platform in place and get everyone on board and then start to roll out those more extensive and exciting, as I call them, use cases.

Shannon: Yeah.

Bridget: And it just makes a world of sense what you have just really walked us through.

Bridget: So thank you.

Bridget: I really thank you.

Bridget: You’ve all created a verbal white paper here on how to do this right.

Bridget: So awesome.

Bridget: Thank you.

Bridget: So kind of stay in the space of risk as it relates to time.

Bridget: You know, time is clutch in every instance, right?

Bridget: And AI is not taking any prisoners.

Bridget: What are you seeing?

Bridget: And more importantly, how are you helping clients who have the impediment of legacy technology on their path to adopting AI to enhance customer experience?

Shannon: I mean, selfishly, I love this question, right?

Shannon: And I think, Tom, you touched on this before, right?

Shannon: We have been around a long time, and the vast majority of the time, when you’ve got these big systems in our industry, specifically, they are still sitting on mainframes.

Shannon: And I have a very lovely conversation when I can walk in and it’s on IBM mainframe, and we can talk about how we helped to build that type of platform 30 or 40 years ago.

Shannon: And now we’ve also helped to build and partner with AI companies like Tom’s at Salesforce to have a platform to move it to and know how to move it.

Shannon: And now we can do it faster, leveraging AI.

Shannon: I think that’s the most, really the most important thing right now.

Shannon: There’s been talk about getting off of one system and on to another or modernizing the mainframe, even if you keep it there.

Shannon: But the time and effort to do that in the past was pretty extensive.

Shannon: We’re starting to see the clients now say, okay, well, if I can speed up every other project, how do I leverage AI to speed that up?

Shannon: And can I get that done in weeks and months, what used to take years to do?

Shannon: And that’s the conversation we’re having now with most of our clients.

Bridget: I hadn’t really thought about it, but yeah.

Bridget: There should be a use case for AI helping to speed up Enhanced and some Mainframe.

Bridget: I mean.

Shannon: Absolutely.

Bridget: Super.

Bridget: Okay.

Bridget: So as we think about the complexity that y’all were talking about, where perhaps the business streams bigger than maybe, maybe feasible at that moment.

Bridget: One thing that I’d like to just talk about is the emotions around how loyalty really is created between a customer and a brand, right?

Bridget: That the customer feels connected emotionally and feels like they’re cared for consistently and then creating this trust.

Bridget: What are you seeing and how is it happening that loyalty is embedded in the entirety of the journey that the brand offers its customers?

Shannon: We’ve actually thought a little bit about this topic, so I’ll jump in.

Shannon: I think first of all, you asked the question around creating loyalty.

Shannon: We started the whole conversation around loyalty programs and loyalty platforms.

Shannon: They are two very different things.

Shannon: Loyalty really is about how do I create trust, and you mentioned customer journey, it’s about the entire customer journey.

Shannon: When we talk about Salesforce’s loyalty program, that’s only one piece of how their platform creates loyalty.

Shannon: They have a sales platform, a services platform, a marketing platform that has this loyalty component.

Shannon: Well, service creates loyalty, and ease of sale and the ability to understand what I want to create personalization in that journey also helps to create loyalty.

Shannon: It’s not just the offers.

Shannon: It’s not just the points that I earn or the status that I earn.

Shannon: It is you starting to know me and be able to personalize that entire experience, right?

Shannon: The loyalty program captures the output, but loyalty is created in every single interaction that I have with you as a company.

Shannon: And so I think that’s really where the power of IBM and Salesforce together come in, because Salesforce is providing the platform to do all of that, which we have not had in the past.

Shannon: We bring a unique point of view from the customer experience as my background, and it’s near and dear to my heart about how do we take every one of those interactions, tie it back to the platform and really understand that customer, and then interact with them in a way that’s going to create loyalty over the long term.

Shannon: So for me, that’s how you weave loyalty in, as you look at it as loyalty and not just a loyalty program.

Tom: Yeah, that’s a really important point.

Tom: I mean, I think building trust across that, trust is one of our core values at Salesforce.

Tom: Having the visibility across the entire customer journey, so that when someone calls in, maybe they’re in a SEV one, there’s a system down, you don’t have a salesperson reaching out with an offer, right?

Tom: You’re not marketing to that person actively at the same time.

Tom: At the same time, if they call in and they’re having a good experience and they are maybe a potential upgrade or something of that nature, you can do a warm handoff to a salesperson, right?

Tom: You can gather more data, you’re marketing to them more efficiently, it’s more personalized, so every one of those touch points helps build on that trust.

Bridget: So I agree with everything.

Bridget: I’m really excited about everything you’ve said, and it also gives me great hope, Shannon and Tom, about actually doing the timing piece right.

Bridget: You mentioned, don’t provide a commercial pitch when they’re having an operational problem.

Bridget: Contextualize what it is you’re going to engage with them in that moment, and that is just a big part of the trust factor too.

Bridget: So it’s not only just the what, but even the timing of the what.

Bridget: So I’m hopeful all this hyper personalization and the greater capabilities is also going to really facilitate the right timing too.

Bridget: So we can stop talking about it and we can do it.

Shannon: Absolutely, 100 percent.

Bridget: So is there anything you can talk to us a bit about?

Bridget: We’ve touched on it, but let me just complete a question where you see your business clients really exactly know where they want to go, but they’re absent the enabling tools to do it.

Bridget: Are you seeing this?

Bridget: Any examples you can give and anything in market that reflects that?

Tom: I mean, I think it runs the gamut from, we have customers that put out an RFP, not really knowing what they’re looking for, and they’re looking for a fully outsourced managed solution, including the staff to run it.

Tom: So you can have that on one extreme, you have customers that come to us with literally thousands of really well-written requirements for a system.

Tom: They think they know exactly what they need, and they come with a very informed opinion.

Tom: So it kind of runs the gamut from that.

Tom: But I think at the end of the day, everybody kind of sits someplace in between those for the most part, which is where having, I’ll say it again, a unified platform and a strong partner like IBM that’s kind of been there and done that and seen all of the bits and pieces, brings all of that together.

Tom: And that’s where I think most clients get the most value when they’re undertaking projects like that.

Shannon: Yeah.

Shannon: We love it when clients come to us in the middle of that conversation, right?

Shannon: Because I think that’s where we can add value and kind of steer them in the right direction, just from our experience with loyalty programs from a business perspective in general.

Shannon: And I think you’ve heard Tom and I have a unique approach towards how we do this in the sense that we are going to talk about the platforms that you need to build and we’re going to talk about the way that you turn those on responsibly, do it in the right way and build on those.

Shannon: And I think when you have that conversation, then we just find out where the client is on their journey, right?

Shannon: What are they trying to get on the outcome and what have they done so far and how do we take them from where they are to where they want to go?

Shannon: And just like we talked about, it’s a different understanding and hyper-personalizing trip planning for me.

Shannon: We have to do that for our clients in terms of, okay, where’s your journey?

Shannon: Where are you on in the loyalty journey, for example?

Shannon: What do you already have in place?

Shannon: What do you want to get to?

Shannon: Just what you have in place, can you use that to get there or do we need to take an approach to swap the platform out first?

Bridget: Right.

Shannon: Those kind of things are the discussions that I see us having a lot with our clients.

Bridget: Yeah, sequencing is important, right?

Tom: Yeah, he’s exactly right.

Tom: I mean, we’re in a joint pursuit now where we’re in that stage where the client has a core set of capabilities they’re looking at, but they’re being informed by IBM on refining those and understanding, how do I leverage a platform to enable the outcome?

Bridget: That’s right.

Tom: And so, that’s where I think that kind of a partnership really helps because at the heart of the Salesforce as a software company, we don’t have that deep loyalty expertise where we know all of the requirements that make up a loyalty program.

Tom: We can enable a ton of functionality, but it really relies on the partners like IBM to make that come to life.

Shannon: And I’m hoping we’re back in two or three years to tell that story live, and it’s a complex area one for sure, because I know exactly which one you’re talking about, Tom.

Bridget: We look forward to it.

Bridget: Okay, so let’s talk about something kind of in the neighborhood and truly on its own as well.

Bridget: Where you have a client with no tech debt, no legacy technology, whiteboard possibilities, like a Greenfield.

Bridget: Can you give us some examples perhaps of a Greenfield project engagement that you all collaborated on and brought to market, and what you are seeing with it in terms of results?

Shannon: Yeah, I mean, absolutely we can.

Shannon: I think those are always fun.

Shannon: We don’t get those very often.

Shannon: But when they come along, it’s super exciting because you can truly build the base and the platform to go do what they want to do and understand their vision for the long term early on.

Shannon: I think Mole Group is probably the best example of that.

Shannon: They are a gasoline company and really wanted to move from being a traditional gas station convenience store type business to something that was really about creating a loyalty around a transportation ecosystem.

Shannon: They came to us and Salesforce together and said, how do we do this?

Shannon: We were their implementation partner to transform all their business processes and help them get to that point and implement the Salesforce platform to do that.

Shannon: If you think about, they were coming from what I would call predefined marketing.

Shannon: They already had the list of campaigns they were going to go do and then they went and executed them, but it took them forever if they wanted to change those.

Shannon: They couldn’t do it in the moment and they wanted to move that to be much more behavioral based so they could read the customer signals and then automatically insert themselves and do personalization that way.

Shannon: That was the journey we took them on.

Shannon: Their revenue is up 15 to 30 percent depending on the segment that you look at.

Shannon: Their CSAT scores are 20 percent higher than their competitors.

Shannon: But what I think we’re most excited about is we did it in a way where we set the foundation so they can scale in the future.

Shannon: I don’t think there’s anything that they’re looking at that they can’t do going forward.

Bridget: Oh, that’s terrific.

Bridget: All around the outcomes and the ability to do more in the future without a lot of time consumed to make it happen.

Bridget: So for our audience, we will put the name of the company in the show notes for your reference.

Bridget: So again, in this neighborhood of engagement types, are you seeing any less obvious applications of a loyalty program and a loyalty program platform that our audience may benefit learning a bit more about?

Tom: Yeah, I think so, you know, an interesting one that kind of opened my eyes a little bit at our company kickoff back in February, we had the CEO from Goodyear come in and speak to the team on stage.

Tom: And he talked about loyalty for a tire program, and he described it as this really unsexy black donut business implements a loyalty program that’s wildly successful.

Tom: And so, I listened to that, we talked about it a little bit at a executive leadership meeting afterwards, and it was really eye-opening for all the folks in the room who were coming from different parts of the business.

Tom: So not part of my team in travel, transportation, hospitality, but other areas of business, whether it’s retail, financial services, there’s all sorts of businesses now that are looking at these loyalty programs as a way to get closer to their customers.

Tom: So I think it’s a super relevant conversation right now.

Bridget: Absolutely.

Bridget: You know, I even kind of don’t agree with my less than obvious qualifier in the question.

Bridget: And I think what’s really important, and I underscore this for ourselves, for our audience on at the beginning and the end of the day, the end consumer of a tire or a bank product or something that just isn’t like top of mind because it’s so biased with retail and travel and food.

Bridget: There are endless opportunities on leveraging a loyalty program construct as a part of how you affect the behavior of your customers and ideally engendering that loyalty that is just endlessly valuable when you’re doing it right.

Bridget: So I think it’s a really important point, Tom, about there’s a lot of applications for this.

Bridget: So don’t be narrowing your views on when it can be applied.

Bridget: It can be broadly applied.

Shannon: I don’t think there’s a client in any industry that we’re talking to that doesn’t have this as a key topic of consideration.

Shannon: I think, Bridget, when we first met before we jumped into this podcast, I was talking to you about the entertainment industry, whether it be theme parks or sports or those things.

Shannon: Everyone thinks about, oh man, we’re retailers and travel companies are trying to turn their customers into fans and they already have the fans.

Shannon: They have a different problem.

Shannon: They’re trying to turn those fans into customers.

Shannon: Only a small subset are actually interacting and spending money with their favorite theme park or their favorite team or those kind of things.

Shannon: And they’re starting to use loyalty to do that.

Shannon: They have a unique product that they can start to use as a perk in that loyalty program and to take those fans that they already have, it means fanatics.

Shannon: So, they’re predisposed to spend, but they may not be spending.

Shannon: And so, I don’t think that there is an industry out there that’s not having this conversation right now.

Shannon: So, it’s just more core to some businesses than others.

Bridget: Well, that to me just bodes well for a super bright future for all players, all stakeholders in this, and I’m just excited for the future.

Bridget: Okay, so as we start kind of wrapping up our conversation, we’ve had so many points about AI, but, you know, and it seems to me that it’s, the art of the possible is actually endless.

Bridget: But with that, you know, what are you seeing as priority in terms of the use of AI?

Tom: I think for us, I mean, there’s a handful of things, right?

Tom: On the predictive front, we’re having a lot of conversations around partner management.

Tom: So, how do you determine who your best partners are, potential new partner opportunities if you look at, I think, it was Delta that announced a relationship with Uber, which makes a ton of sense, right?

Tom: You get off a flight, one of the first things you might do is get in an Uber and go to a hotel.

Tom: So, how do you enable that through a loyalty platform?

Tom: Promotion performance, fraud detection, those are all top of mind from a predictive front.

Tom: When we think about the generative AI front, then you’re talking more on content offer creation, giving the right recommendations, personalizing the experience, giving them next best actions and options along the way.

Tom: Those are all things that we’re seeing that are top of mind conversations right now.

Bridget: Very good.

Bridget: And so, anything we haven’t covered today that you think would be important for our audience to learn about either the collaboration, the partnership between Salesforce and IBM, or AI in general, anything at all?

Shannon: I think two things I would just kind of touch on in terms of wrap up.

Shannon: One is, I think governance.

Shannon: Our clients are really looking at that, right?

Shannon: In the approach to governance and having, you know, trust around how we’re using the AI, it’s still, you know, a very, very important topic of conversation around this.

Shannon: And it kind of leads to the second one, which is, anytime you’re touching a core platform like this, it is hard, it is complex, and you want to have trusted partners to do that.

Shannon: And so I think just not underestimating, you know, how important it is to create the right ecosystem of partners to go down that journey with you, we’re seeing that just be a key critical factor in terms of how successful the undertaking is.

Bridget: Yeah.

Tom: Those are really great points.

Tom: I mean, I think the strength of the partner can’t be underplayed because these guys see hundreds of these programs.

Tom: They’re not implementing at once, right?

Tom: They’ve done this, they’ve been there, they’ve seen all the flavors of it.

Tom: That tied in with a platform that scales to your needs and changes over time as your needs change, those things are critical.

Bridget: So, you know, thank you so much for a conversation that proved to be even better than I knew it was going to be.

Bridget: So, really thank you, both Shannon and Tom.

Bridget: Would it be okay if we provided your LinkedIn contact information and our show notes for our audience?

Shannon: Absolutely.

Bridget: Okay.

Bridget: Well, that’s terrific, guys.

Bridget: So thanks again.

Bridget: And thank you to our audience for joining us for today’s edition of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Let’s Talk Loyalty TV.

Bridget: And be sure to tune in again soon for another great conversation on Customer Loyalty.

Bridget: Bye.

Shannon: Bye.

Shannon: Thank you.

Shannon: Thank you.

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